World

On Sunday Tehran was relatively quiet compared to the past weeks street violence, but with fresh calls from the opposition for reforms and a new election it’s doubtful we’ve seen the worst of it. Despite the spirit of protesters, Hubdub forecasts there’s only a 16% chance Ahmadinejad is disempowered.

Will President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be disempowered or resign?

Politics
The battle for universal health care is heating up and any chances of a well behaved and restrained fight are quickly diminishing. How likely is that we’ll get the damn thing this year? Hubdub says we’ve only got a 48% chance.

Will the U.S. enact a comprehensive health care plan in 2009?

Entertainment

After Indiana Jone’s last adventure involving aliens, the thought of another Lucas and Spielberg pillaging of a classic doesn’t have me too enthusiastic. Better yet it’s 96% likely the next Indiana Jones doesn’t have Harrison Ford in it.

Will there be a fifth Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford?

Business
Is Steve Job’s return to Apple imminent? Well, judging from predictions on Hubdub and the latest news the answers yes!

Will Steve Jobs return to be Apple’s CEO in 2009?

Sport

The oldest and most prestigious tennis tournament in the world has had some of the most exciting matches, including last year’s instant classic with Nadal and Federer. Although Nadal is skipping Wimbledon, it’s no less exciting. Currently Roger Federer is the frontrunner with a 44% chance of wining Wimbledon.

Who will win the 2009 Men’s Wimbledon?

Trading percentages given are at time of posting and may not match up with markets after the fact due to Hubdub users forecasting on said markets. Posted from the Hubdub blog.

Betfair Customer Services 06 Jun 15:55

We held a forum Q&A session in March in which we announced that we were working on an improved version of bet matching. This would allow us to match bets across selections, and to match those bets at better prices than requested where possible, as we do now when matching back bets against lay bets on the same selection. We wanted to provide customers with an update on our progress towards this.

An example of how this would work in practice:

You submit a bet request to back Roger Federer at 1.7, but there are no unmatched lay bets on Federer at 1.7 or higher to match your bet. However, we do have an unmatched customer request to back his opponent at 2.2 already on the system. The way matching works currently there are two possible outcomes:

1. your bet will remain unmatched, or
2. another customer will subsequently lay your bet, and it will be matched at 1.7, the price you requested.

With the improved bet matching process we would match your request to back Federer against the customer looking to back his opponent at 2.2, and provide an improvement to the price you requested. Your bet would be matched at the best possible price that is a valid increment on Betfair’s odds ladder, in this case 1.83.

As we mentioned during the Q&A, doing the necessary calculations for an individual bet on a market with only two selections is relatively simple. However bet matching has to work efficiently in much more complex situations: i.e. in markets with many runners, where bets may be partially matched, and matched against bets at more than one price. We also understand that customers would expect no deterioration in the overall performance of bet matching as a result of us adding this functionality. It’s taken us a little longer than we originally hoped to find a solution that meets all those objectives. However we’ve coded a new version of bet matching, and our performance tests on the new process indicate that it will match backs against lays and bets across selections more efficiently than the existing bet matching process.

We are now into the final few weeks of testing, and expect to be ready to introduce this improvement to the site in early July. Again as we mentioned in the Q&A it was a higher priority for us to find a way to provide price improvements for customers than to resolve issues around the withdrawal of non-runners, so we don’t intend to match bets across selections in horse racing markets in the near future. We’d therefore expect most situations where we would match across selections to occur in the busiest 2- and 3-runner markets, including football and tennis. It’s a busy month ahead for both those sports, and as we believe it’s prudent not to introduce this change at peak times we’ve taken the decision to wait until Euro 2008 and Wimbledon are completed. If Wimbledon is completed on schedule, and assuming remaining testing goes to plan, we expect to make this change to the site on Monday 7th July. We will confirm this nearer the time, but wanted to give customers advance notice as we’ve previously promised.

Thank you for your continued feedback.

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More Old Info:

- Michael Robb

- Tony Clare

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BetFair-TradeFair is legal and has ethics, while TradeSports-InTrade is not and has none.

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Via Steve Roman who provides the recap and another excerpt, The New York Times:

[...] At the center of the investigation is Betfair, one of the largest so-called online sports exchanges, which matches bettors directly against each other, rather than against the house, as traditional bookmakers do. Betfair set off the current crisis when it voided $7 million in bets after Mr. Davydenko withdrew from a match against 74th-ranked Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina at the Prokom Open in August in Sopot, Poland. Mr. Davydenko retired because of an injury with Mr. Vassallo Arguello ahead, 2-6, 6-3, 2-1. During the match, Betfair notified the ATP that its security team had recognized irregular betting patterns.

[...] At Betfair, which is based in London, tennis ranks third behind horse racing and soccer among its one million customers, who together place five million bets each day. More than $60 million was handled for the Wimbledon’s men’s final, won by Roger Federer over Rafael Nadal.

Robin Marks, a Betfair spokesman, said the decision to void the bets from the match in Poland — the first time the company had ever done so — was an easy one. A large amount of money was coming in for the obscure match, Mr. Marks said, and the betting patterns made little sense: Mr. Davydenko went from an odds-on favorite to a significant underdog before the match started, and his odds drifted higher and more money came in for Mr. Vassallo Arguello even after Mr. Davydenko won the first set.

By the next morning, Betfair’s 40-person security team had unearthed additional information by combing its records and tracing unique Internet addresses. Betfair passed on that information in accordance with the ATP’s anti-corruption program, which was put in place in 2003 in the wake of a match-fixing scandal in cricket. Mr. Marks said Betfair has similar agreements with 28 other sports leagues on which it takes bets. He declined to specify what Betfair had found. “Why would the betting patterns change before a ball was even hit?” Mr. Marks said. “Why would more money come in against him when he had already won the first set? You come to the assumption that somebody knew something.” [...]

Previously: BetFair has an anti-fraud team whereas InTrade-TradeSports has none.